Automation in DevOps: Why and How to Automate DevOps Tasks

Automation in DevOps: Why and How to Automate DevOps Tasks

Teams working on business application software are under constant pressure to satisfy rising client expectations due to the expanding software industry. As a rule, these anticipations consist of:

• Strengthening Efficiency and Effectiveness
• Adding new features
• Assuring constant connectivity and availability

​​With the rise of web-based services, software development as we know it has to evolve. Instead of generating software to meet a single customer’s needs, the current trend is to view software creation as an ongoing service. In order to better adapt their products to their customers’ ever-changing wants and needs, software companies have shifted from a top-down to a bottom-up approach, known as agile.

Responding to this shift, the software industry has adopted current Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) approaches like Agile, Scrum, and Kanban to speed up the delivery of new features, upgrades, and bug fixes.

Streamlining the development process is possible with the help of automation in DevOps. As a consequence, two major shifts occur:

• Improvements in Interdepartmental and Inter-Team Cooperation
• Development process automation, especially for routine, repetitive operations
• When DevOps and automation are used together, the software development life cycle (SDLC) is improved.

Processes for Automating DevOps

DevOps automation refers to the process of carrying out routine or manually intensive DevOps tasks without the need for human intervention. DevOps lifecycle areas that can benefit from automation are numerous, and include:

• Planning and creation
• The Release and Deployment of Software
• Monitoring

DevOps automation aims to streamline the DevOps lifecycle by minimizing the amount of manual effort involved. There are many significant gains due to automation:

• Reduces the requirement for massive groups of workers
• Dramatically decreases the likelihood of mistakes made by humans
• Team output is boosted
• It establishes a nimble DevOps lifecycle
• Automating a process or a task typically involves the use of specialized software and a set of predefined settings.
• Automating the standardizing process

We are well aware of the shortcomings of a unified SDLC approach, including its inability to offer the agility and reactivity necessary to meet the challenges posed by:

• Demands from different types of customers
• Changing technological landscape
• What to watch for in the market
• Specifications for conformity
• Organizational objectives set internally
• Inevitably, there are requisite technological and business considerations for every limitation.

To overcome these difficulties, DevOps groups should use uniform methodologies, tools, protocols, and metrics. The combined power of these aids creates an atmosphere that:

• Avoids or reduces repetition
• Proper rules are provided, and this helps ensure
• Threats are lessened

Moving from automation to orchestration is facilitated by using established techniques, which also improves the possibility of automating other manual activities. Thus, it is fair to assert:

• Implementing a good automation plan for DevOps relies heavily on accurately capturing the automation scope.
• Aspects of flexibility and conformity
• However, standardization shouldn’t be used to prevent flexibility, especially when it comes to the tools used.

Due to its dynamic nature, DevOps will be implemented and utilized in a variety of ways across various businesses. When tools are standardized without any room for flexibility, they can’t keep up with the rapidly developing technology and methods used in the business.

DevOps’s idea of automation, which includes standardization, also applies to the governance models. The standardized we create must be malleable enough to accommodate:

• Specifications Changes
• Because of advancements in technology.
• To achieve this goal, a means must be devised to encourage the widespread implementation of recent advances in software engineering that simplify the tools and procedures used in DevOps.

To give one example, the company needs to build and approve a standardized library of tools that can be used for development, testing, deployment, and monitoring at the request of any team member. There should be a well-defined process in place for fast vetting new tools and technologies before they are added to the standard DevOps toolkit when they become necessary.

Simplifying and Speeding Up Routine Operations is Only Part of Automation

Automation aids in the larger DevOps landscape by:

In order to maximize efficiency, you must

• Reduce misunderstandings among the production, testing, and development departments.
• Incorporate techniques that promote flexibility by standardizing procedures
• DevOps automation has many advantages, and here are a few more.

Gains in productivity are only one side effect of automating tasks. Additional advantages are as follows:

Consistency

Finding bugs and problematic behaviors in software is a common problem, but automation makes it much easier to spot them.

High levels of automation produce predictable and repeatable results in any given process or operation. User mistakes have been all but eradicated, thanks to the software’s underlying static setup and the lack of user involvement.

Scalability

As opposed to manual processes, automated ones scale quite well. In order to accommodate the growing demand, simply add more automated procedures.

To a large extent, the availability of team members limits how much you can scale in a manual setting.

Nonetheless, in a cloud-based setting, where resources are dynamically scaled depending on workload, the only limitation on scalability is the availability of underlying software and hardware. Automatic in/out/up/down scalability is a good illustration of this principle in action.

Speed

The speed with which you can complete the various stages of the DevOps lifecycle has a direct impact on your capacity to actually deliver the project.

When a procedure is automated, it will be carried out immediately, regardless of when it is triggered or who is available to do so. In addition, standardizing and automating a process using a preexisting template nearly always results in a faster final product than doing the same thing by hand.

Flexibility

With automation, we may modify the parameters and features of the program to suit our needs.

Functionality and scope are typically limited only by the setup of the automation process, which can be easily adjusted to match the needs of the project. It’s more versatile than re-educating an employee each time the process is revamped.

To what extent should automation in DevOps processes be implemented?

All the things that can be automated, to put it simply.

In reality, however, extrinsic forces, including:

• Organizational necessities
• The potential of the technology.

An effective DevOps group will know which steps of their DevOps lifecycle need to be automated. I’ve compiled a list of typical tasks that would benefit greatly from being automated.

A method of continuous delivery and integration (CI/CD)

The key concepts and techniques that govern agile software development stress that continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is the most important part of a software development process that needs to be automated. All of these processes can be automated:

• Revisions to source code
• Builds
• Deploying Applications in Test and Production Environments
• The Administration of Physical Facilities
• Setting up, configuring, and maintaining infrastructure elements like networks and servers can eat up a lot of time.

Developing software-defined infrastructure that can manage infrastructure with few or no human inputs is an important step toward automating infrastructure management.

Trying Out Software

To automate everything here would be the best-case scenario. Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to automate tests of any kind with the help of test automation technologies like selenium and puppeteer. It’s possible that this includes:

• Straightforward Tests for Individual Units
• User Interface Testing
• The use of smoke detectors
• Evaluations of the User Experience
• (Find out what automated testing is and how it works.)
• Monitoring

Due to the rapid pace of change, it has become practically impossible to keep track of individual components and associated shifts. The DevOps team can benefit from automation since it facilitates the creation of automatic monitoring rules and alerts for keeping tabs on:

• Access to Necessary Facilities
• Performance
• Threats to safety Etc.
• Data logging and analysis
• When troubleshooting an app, logs are your best bet. Numerous logs could be produced by a given application.

Using log management solutions, you can automate the collection, storage, and analysis of these logs, making it easy to identify software problems.

• Instances of DevOps-based Automation
• Now, let’s look at some concrete applications of automation in DevOps.
• Constructing software environments using established templates that deploy bundled apps instantly using Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFormation and Terraform.
• Construction of a Jenkins pipeline for use in automating software application builds and testing.
• Setting up a service to monitor the network and perform automatic intrusion detection and prevention, like Snort or Suricata.
• In order to provide a flawless user experience, it is important to test it in advance by using automation frameworks to mimic real-world user actions.
• Making use of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash to set up automated monitoring of the application and logs, display the data in a readable fashion, and notify the appropriate parties when something goes wrong.

Automation in DevOps Software

There is a plethora of software available for use in automated processes. Full automation in the DevOps pipeline is possible with either free or paid-for software. Commonly used are tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

When it comes to managing configurations across platforms, Puppet and Chef are two of the best options available. Automating the process of setting up and maintaining infrastructure is what these technologies are all about.

CI/CD tools like Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo automate the entire software development lifecycle, from the pipeline to deployment.

The DevOps pipeline also makes use of other software and applications, some of which are more specialized than the others and are nonetheless essential, such as:

• Docker and Kubernetes, are two examples of containerized software
• Ansible, Terraform, and Vagrant for establishing infrastructure.
• Git, CVS, and Subversion are all useful tools for managing code repositories.
• Nagios, QuerySurge, and OverOps are some examples of infrastructure/application monitoring tools.
• Security tools like Snort, Splunk, and Suricata for keeping an eye on things
• Tools like Splunk, Datadog, and SolarWinds Log Analyzer for log management
• By integrating these resources, you may build an end-to-end automated DevOps pipeline.

Using the capabilities of cloud platforms, there is also an increasing trend of moving DevOps and automated work there. Both AWS and Azure, being two of the market leaders, provide comprehensive DevOps services that address every stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

• AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, & AWS CodeStar, all from Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure Pipelines, Repositories, Test Strategies, Artifacts, and Boards
• DevOps are bolstered by automation

Replacing human interaction is not the only goal of automation. Change your perspective and see automation as a means to a more streamlined DevOps lifecycle workflow.

Tasks and processes that would see a notable increase in performance or efficiency through automation should be prioritized. Otherwise, you risk wasting time and money automating an activity that provides little to no return on the investment.

Automation in the DevOps process, on the other hand, will result in better, more regularly released software with zero downsides for customers or the business.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed our post about automation in DevOps. With this knowledge, we know that you will be able to automate DevOps practices and reduce the time and effort it takes to get things done. So what are you waiting for? Try out some of our tips today by visiting Enteros.

About Enteros

​Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine-learning database platforms.